The plot of The Spirit is largely pointless and could easily be summed up in a few minutes. There’s a large amount of it that could easily be cut out, and everything would make more sense than it ultimately ends up being. For example, the opening scene in which a cop gets shot is used only to show us some of the characters. Except the cop played no purpose in this set-up, instead getting shot only so he could grab a necklace that ends up not being all that important anyway.
The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is a man who has come back from death, and instead of going on with his life like one would hope you would, he decides to become a masked vigilante, working alongside the police force. He works alone, except for a seemingly stray cat that follows him around. The main villain of the picture is named “The Octopus” (Samuel L. Jackson), who is accompanied by a sidekick named “Floss” (Scarlett Johansson). Both The Octopus and The Spirit are hard to kill, deciding after the film’s opening fight scene to just leave each other be for a while. Apparently it is too much work to actually kill one another.
What The Octopus wants is a vase containing the Blood of Heracles. This vase is in a box. There is another, identical, box, which contains something that another character wants. That’s how most of the story spends its time; The Octopus tries to locate this vase, while The Spirit tries to locate The Octopus, and the other character who is in possession of the vase tries to avoid or locate these two superhumans.
All throughout watching The Spirit, I tried to figure out if it was supposed to be satirical. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t. This decision was based on the director, Frank Miller, who I don’t believe would make a comic book film a satire, and also from the source material, which wasn’t satirical either. “The Spirit” was a comic book strip which attempted to be humorous, yes, but it never got to the level of parody.
There are many moments in The Spirit where things are funny. I’ll admit, I laughed at how absurd things were. Most of these moments came from The Octopus, whose character goes off tangent often enough to make you wonder how seriously you are supposed to take him. He also changes outfits in every scene, with these costumes ranging from a full samurai outfit to a Nazi uniform. The Nazi scene was particularly disturbing or hilarious, depending on how you look at it, and what you find funny.
The Spirit shines in one area: The visuals. Like Sin City before it, the film is dark, with the majority of the color coming from the red tie that The Spirit wears. If you’ve seen Sin City, a film that Miller helped direct, you’ll notice the similarities. I almost want to say that The Spirit is worth watching for the visuals alone, but since Sin City exists, there’s no reason to subject you to the 90 minutes that The Spirit takes to play.
In films like this, there is often one character or one performance that can keep you watching. That’s not the case here. No character is memorable or even likable. There’s no reason to care, and there’s no hint of good acting either. Everyone either overacts or doesn’t act at all, feeling instead like they’re reading their lines off a piece of paper. Which, in the case of our lead, is the case for only part of the time. Gabriel Macht does the voiceover, narrating the story from the beginning. However, even when his character is speaking to others, it sounds like he’s still in “voiceover mode”. Maybe that’s just how he sounds, and I shouldn’t fault him on that, but the way he speaks never sounds like he’s talking to anyone but the audience.
There’s a line in the film that I wish I had written down that perfectly summarized my views on The Spirit. I’ll paraphrase it for you: “Can you hurry this along? I’m not getting any younger!” That’s the best way to quickly sum-up how I felt about The Spirit. I was bored. There were so many unnecessary scenes, and without any reason to care, or a good performance to hold my interest, I felt like nodding off. For an action film, that’s just unacceptable.
The Spirit felt much longer than it actually was. That’s never a good sign. There was little to keep me watching it, save for the interesting visual style that was already done a few years prior in Sin City. And at least in that case, I was entertained for the majority of the time. The Spirit falls flat, mostly because of its uninteresting character, lackluster acting and almost non-existent story. It’s intermittently funny, but that, and the visual style, is about all I can say is worth praising.